#nc republicans

[ncdweller]

This guy….

[dr-archeville]

How North Carolina Transformed Itself Into the Worst State to Be Unemployed

Across the country, unemployment systems are collapsing under an unprecedented number of claims. But some state systems, like North Carolina’s, have long made it harder to receive unemployment benefits.

By March, when the coronavirus began accelerating through the United States, Shawn Hill-Watkins had been working as a cashier at a Food Lion supermarket in High Point, North Carolina, for seven months, taking three buses to work and back each day.  She couldn’t afford the groceries she was ringing up for customers, but she had always been outgoing and knew how to keep the mood upbeat.  Older regulars at the market sought out her line.  They knew her by the colorful silk flowers she had sewn for herself, which she would wear behind her ear.

Hill-Watkins is 50, with six children and nine grandchildren.  For years she’s lived around Virginia and in Philadelphia, making ends meet as a hairdresser, a seamstress and a house cleaner.  Last June she came to North Carolina with her youngest son, Devan, after one of her daughters, who was in an abusive relationship, called her for help.  Her daughter later left, but Hill-Watkins decided to remain.  She had gotten the grocery job and eventually moved into a room with a kitchenette in an extended stay hotel just off Interstate 40 in Greensboro.  Devan, who is 15, had made friends on a local football team.  Hill-Watkins had been running around trying to help her children for two decades, she said, “and I felt like I couldn’t run with them anymore.”

Despite the rising risk of COVID-19, Hill-Watkins and her fellow cashiers were not wearing masks in early spring.  It wasn’t long before she came down with something that seemed to be the virus.  She was too sick to work — sleeping for hours and coughing up phlegm — but not sick enough to go to the hospital for testing.  By the time she got back on her feet, a week and a half later, the store had reduced her hours to zero, where they’ve stayed ever since.  (Food Lion said it doesn’t comment on “any specific associate matters” and that it “continues to follow guidance” from all health authorities.)

On April 20, Hill-Watkins filed for unemployment.  For two months, she didn’t hear a word from the Division of Employment Security, or DES, the agency that operates North Carolina’s unemployment insurance system.  By June 19, when her $1,261.60 monthly rent was due, she had $30 to her name.  “There is a real possibility that we will be outside tomorrow,” Hill-Watkins told me a day before her rent deadline.  “I wake up thinking about it.  I go to sleep thinking about it.”

Hill-Watkins’ attempts to chase elusive benefits will sound familiar to the estimated 44 million Americans who have had to follow the absurdist script that often constitutes the application process: The obtuse online forms.  The bewildering notifications and empty emails.  The understaffed hotlines with half-day wait times.  The fleeting transfers to a human operator, followed by a sudden disconnection.

Much of this bureaucratic ineptitude predates the pandemic.  Nearly every unemployment system, run by each of the 50 states, has been plagued by outdated technology and administrative hurdles — and all have been overwhelmed by the sudden and historic spike in claims.

But as real as those problems are, they ignore a more fundamental issue: Some state unemployment systems have long been designed to exclude applicants.  “People are frustrated and complaining everywhere.  But there are degrees of how well states are handling this based on their approach to the program,” said Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank.  “The states that are doing the worst at this have historically done a bad job of it.”

Among the worst, historically and at present, is North Carolina.  At the end of 2019 — when the economy was humming and pandemics were the stuff of horror fiction — fewer than 1 in 10 jobless people in North Carolina received unemployment benefits.  That’s the lowest rate in the country and well below the average of 26%.

The maximum number of weeks someone in the state can draw benefits is currently 12, compared with the national standard of 26 weeks.  And those who receive benefits get less money than they used to: Between 2008 and 2019, the percentage of a worker’s wages replaced has fallen from 53% to 38%.  North Carolina also ranks as the worst state for getting benefits to workers in a timely manner.

These outcomes are the result of a long campaign by North Carolina legislators to restrict and reduce benefits.  In 2013, only a few years after the last economic cataclysm, the state’s Republicans made the deepest cuts to any unemployment insurance system in the country.  “It’s fair to say that we don’t want people on unemployment in North Carolina and that we want them to have jobs,” state Rep. David Lewis, a Republican who helped draft the 2013 legislation, told ProPublica.

The overwhelming need for benefits today, and the delays that millions of Americans like Hill-Watkins have in getting them, has set off a national awakening about the sorry state of unemployment insurance systems.  That reckoning is acute in North Carolina, where jobless people will be particularly vulnerable when the $600 weekly unemployment payments from the federal CARES Act expire at the end of July.

Before the pandemic, the state averaged 3,000 claims a week, according to the DES.  In the first six weeks of the pandemic, its system was flooded with an average of 136,000 claims a week.  “Despite those challenges, if there are no issues with a filed claim, a person usually receives their first payment within 14 days of filing,” said David Rhoades, spokesman for the DES.  In the same statement, he also noted that “in the last five years, DES lost 20%, or $10 million, of its administrative funding.”

Hill-Watkins is certain that she would not have been as eager to remain in North Carolina had she known what was to come.  If she’d been working in, say, Massachusetts when her hours were reduced to zero, she might have quickly received her benefits, which average $557 a week, for up to 30 weeks, the longest duration in the country.  In Massachusetts, 66% of new applicants got their unemployment insurance payments in March, compared with 29% nationally and fewer than 10% in North Carolina, according to a Pew study.  “I could have been anywhere else in the country,” Hill-Watkins said.  “And here I am in the worst place to be.”

Among economists, it’s generally accepted that unemployment insurance is one of the most effective and cost-efficient policies to aid recovery.  The premise is simple: Employers pay into the system in good times, which distributes benefits to employees laid off for economic reasons.  The temporary cash payments only partially replace lost wages and are spent on basic necessities, providing a direct stimulus to local economies.

Economists may agree on this point, but politicians don’t.  Democrats tend to highlight the positives: The benefits help families and promote consumer spending.  Republicans typically point to the negatives: The tax is a burden on employers and a potential disincentive for employees to return to work.  These divides have led to stark partisan and regional contrasts: Many Southern states have reduced benefits, while other parts of the country have maintained or even expanded their payments.

For decades, North Carolina’s program was in the middle of the pack.  Then came the rise of the Tea Party and James Arthur Pope, a retail heir who’s been a major funder for the state’s libertarian movement.  In 2010, Republicans took control of both houses in the legislature and in 2012, secured the governorship, putting the GOP in full command of the state for the first time since Reconstruction.

Among the first items on the new administration’s agenda was an overhaul of the state’s unemployment program.  In less than two weeks, the GOP supermajority passed HB 4, a bill that made the deepest cut to any state’s unemployment compensation in American history.  “In terms of governing, this was the Republicans’ coming out party,” said Mac McCorkle, a former Democratic political consultant who now teaches at Duke University.

The bill slashed the duration of benefits and lowered maximum weekly payment amount from $535 to $350.  It also changed how benefits were calculated — from the highest quarter of a claimant’s earnings in the last year to an average of the most recent two quarters.  Since many workers have their hours and pay reduced in the quarter prior to layoffs, this resulted in smaller payouts.  At the end of 2019, the national average for weekly payments was $378; in North Carolina, it was $277.

The key impetus for these cuts, according to Lewis and two other Republican legislators who supported HB 4, was to pay back the debt — some $2.5 billion — that the state owed the federal government.  In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, 35 states, including North Carolina, had to borrow from the federal government to sustain their unemployment payments.  Those loans came with interest and in 2012, the federal government triggered an increase in the amount that each state’s employers had to pay into the state’s unemployment trust fund.  These higher taxes, Lewis said, “made North Carolina less attractive to a potential employer because you didn’t have to only factor in business expenses, but you also had to factor in your percentage of repaying this debt.”  The goal, he said, was to create “a business climate that is good for business and employees.”

In truth, unemployment insurance taxes in North Carolina were already low.  The year before HB 4 was passed, The Tax Foundation, a policy think tank, ranked the state as having the seventh most favorable unemployment tax for employers.  (It scored less favorably in other categories.)

Not all states that owed money to the federal government took the same path as North Carolina.  Some, like Rhode Island, temporarily raised the amount of taxes employers paid into the system.  Others slowly paid off the debt without making changes, added programs that expanded eligibility or supported short-term compensation for reduced hours (known as work sharing).  “We were fully aware that there might have to be some cuts to pay back the debt,” said Bill Rowe, the deputy director of the North Carolina Justice Center, a progressive policy organization.  “But we were shocked about how severe and permanent they were.  Anything that had previously benefited workers was taken out of our law.”

HB 4 also limited “attached claims,” a feature that had previously streamlined the application process by allowing employers to file in bulk for an entire group of workers who have been laid off.  And the bill disqualified people who had lost a job for “good-cause” reasons, such as family caregiving or to follow a spouse who has to relocate for work, from collecting unemployment.  “You couldn’t just say my husband has been transferred,” said state Rep. Julia Howard, a Republican who was one of the bill’s primary sponsors.  “We made it reasonable, so it was not just a gimme.”

When the law went into effect on July 1, 2013, the effect on people collecting benefits was immediate and made national headlines.  Before HB 4, residents had received extended benefits through the federal government’s 2009 stimulus package.  But this federal aid, which lasted through 2013, required that states maintain their benefits structure.  By rushing to implement their changes, rather than waiting until the end of the year, North Carolina’s Republicans forfeited their constituents’ eligibility for this program, stripping an estimated 170,000 people of benefits.  It was the only legislature to do so.

That decision was “deeply unpopular” in the state, according to The American Conservative, in a 2013 article titled “How Raleigh’s Republicans Forgot the Working Class.”  That analysis noted that North Carolinians were collecting extended unemployment not because it was comfortable but because “there are simply no jobs to be found.”  At the time, the state had the fifth highest unemployment rate in the nation.

The cuts to the state’s unemployment program were part of a broader makeover by free-market ideologues, according to Gene Nichol, a law professor at the University of North Carolina.  “Between 2013 and 2017, there was a real shift in the theory of the role of government, some might generously call it,” he said, noting the general assembly’s elimination of the state’s earned income tax credit, an anti-poverty program popular with conservatives, and its decision not to expand Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act.  “I call it waging a war on poor people.”

Still, a central goal for the law was achieved: North Carolina was able to pay off its debt to the federal government by 2015 — four to five years earlier than it otherwise would have and even more quickly than those who had crafted the bill had anticipated.

At that point, Democrats hoped the assembly would restore benefits to their previous levels, according to three state Democrats.  Instead, the Republican majority cut deeper.  It pared taxes on employers and added provisions to further restrict eligibility by requiring claimants to contact five potential employers each week.

North Carolina was not the only state to slash benefits.  The “realignment,” as Howard, the Republican state representative, put it, was adopted by other states in the region.  “We have had numerous other states call us and ask us if we would send them a one-sheeter on what we did and how we did it.”

Between 2011 and 2015, eight other states, mostly in the south, reduced how long people can collect benefits.  These cuts can have a disproportionate impact on Black workers, who average 25.9 weeks of unemployment, compared with the average white worker who remains unemployed for 19 weeks, according to the National Employment Law Project.

It’s a “troubling trend,” said Harry Holzer, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University and former chief economist for the Labor Department.  There is a real risk, he said, that employees may find unemployment to be too comfortable and that employers might flee to states with lower taxes.  But “so many states now go way too far in the direction of not wanting to upset the employer community,” he said.  “And the states that let the pendulum swing so far are doing permanent damage to workers and households.”

Hill-Watkins has never been the type of person who is easily discouraged by bureaucracy and paperwork.  She used to volunteer with a tenants union and is meticulous with records.  She sent the DES every piece of information it requested.  Every week she uploaded her schedule, listing zero hours.  She called the hotline, messaged the chatline.  “No one wants this for me more than I do,” she said.

In May, Hill-Watkins said, she waited for hours on hold to talk to someone at the DES, with 189 people ahead of her.  When it was her turn, she was told there was nothing anyone there could do for her over the phone: The agency already had the materials to process Hill-Watkins’ claim, it said.  She just needed to wait for someone to do so.  “I know there’s a lot of people going through the same situation I’m going through,” Hill-Watkins said.  “But it’s ridiculous that the wait time is 14 days to six weeks.  And that’s just to know whether you are even eligible.”

When asked about the delays that Hill-Watkins faced, Rhoades, the DES spokesman, said the agency does not comment on individual cases.  Generally, he said that the agency was prioritizing claims that were filed earliest, having adjudicated 96% of claims filed since mid-Mid March and delivered 82.8% of its first payments within the 14-day standard.  The massive influx in the volume of claims, short staffing levels, and new procedures introduced by the CARES Act have slowed down the timeliness of some payments, he said.

Hill-Watkins had never filed for unemployment before.  “I worked,” she told me in early June.  “No matter what it is, I work.”  She was holding the phone with one hand and cooking dinner for her son — some chicken, onions and bell pepper she’d picked up from the food bank — with the other.  “I raised six children on my own.”  Before working at the supermarket, she had earned a living as an independent contractor by tapping into a network of longtime clients, references and friends.  She knew who needed a babysitter, who wanted a dress made or who was due to get braids done.  If there weren’t a virus to worry about, she knew she would have been able to make do on her own after her hours were cut.  The problem was that “there’s no social distancing in any of those jobs,” and with high blood pressure, she couldn’t take the risk.

Since losing work, every day had become a blur of emails sent, numbers dialed, calls unanswered.  She shared her resume with employers on Indeed.  She scoured the lists of food banks, local charities and low-income housing opportunities.  She wrote to social service agencies and social workers, to legislators and churches.  The subject line read: “Scared single mother.”

Few people responded and when they did, there always seemed to be a catch.  Like the homeless agency that told her she didn’t qualify for a shelter because she was already living in a hotel.  Or the fact that the most promising lead she found for remote work — providing customer service from home — required her to get her own landline.  To get a landline, she needed an apartment, but without a job, she couldn’t fill out an apartment application.

These dead ends left her at the mercy of the state.  “I never wanted to be sitting and waiting for somebody to justify giving me money to survive,” she said.  “I would rather be out there scraping and scratching and hustling than waiting for someone to validate my life with their little change.”

One of the few consolations for Hill-Watkins was that she wasn’t alone.  Several other workers — and even state legislators trying to file on behalf of their constituents — described the same difficulties she had with the program’s application process.  For instance, if applicants make a single mistake, it’s not possible to go back into the form to change it.  Instead, they have to call a hotline, with a wait time that often ranges between two and seven hours.  And when someone from the hotline says they are transferring the call, more often than not the applicant will get disconnected.  The DES confirmed that, in order to prevent fraud, it limits the changes claimants can make to their application.

A contractor working with the DES call center, who asked to remain anonymous, confirmed that these frustrations are in fact standard features of the system.  “If the whole queue is full, then the line gets dropped,” she said, and applicants “have no choice but to call back and go through this process over and over again.”

The unemployment system, she said, is just as opaque and chaotic for those working inside it as it is for those on the outside.  Call center employees do not have the authority to adjudicate claims in North Carolina, the contractor said; they are merely a conduit through which residents can vent their frustration.  Some of the people she speaks with have lost their houses and jobs and want to scream about it.  Others just want to sit on the phone with her and cry.  “I’m the only voice they can talk to,” she said.  All she can do is listen and tell them to keep waiting.  (The DES responded, “We are training call center representatives to build their skill sets so they can assist as many people as possible.  However, more complex issues may need to be handled by the more experienced staff.”)

These headaches are not surprising to experts like Michele Evermore, a senior policy analyst with the National Employment Law Project.  The coronavirus may have been unexpected, Evermore said, but the collapse of unemployment systems in many states was not.  Evermore published a prescient report in early March, warning that the depth of North Carolina’s cuts to its unemployment benefits and staffing had left the state unprepared for the next recession.  “These systems that were undermined for the past decade are very hard to turn around,” she said, comparing the process to steering a barge.

Such an attempt to reverse course is precisely what’s happening in North Carolina right now.  Since March, Roy Cooper, the state’s Democratic governor, has signed several executive orders to temporarily remove some of the obstacles from the application process.  The orders waive the requirement that applicants search for work; eliminate the one-week waiting period between filing for unemployment and receiving benefits; and allow employers to file claims for entire groups of workers who have been laid off.  (The DES, according to Rhoades, its spokesman, has also acted to “improve its processes, technology and staffing levels to respond to the surge in claims,” including by adding an online chat feature and increasing staff from 500 employees to 2,600.)  The orders show, Evermore said, that “when the government decides to clear away the roadblocks to paying benefits, it can.”

Still, none of those changes are permanent; they expire when the governor rescinds his declaration of the state of emergency.  North Carolina Democrats hope the crisis will create an opportunity to make permanent changes, just as the 2008 recession did for their Republican counterparts.

So far the signs have not been promising.  In May the Republican-controlled state assembly rejected a Democratic measure, previously passed in the senate, to temporarily increase the maximum benefit amount from $350 to $400.  (The extra costs would have been fully covered by the federal government as part of its extension of state benefits.)  “I’ve pushed back pretty hard about making changes during this time frame,” Howard said.  “I do not think that now is the time — when the ship is on fire — that we need to be trying to change things.”

On June 17, nearly two months after she had applied, Hill-Watkins received an update on her unemployment application.  The notice, which she accessed through the state’s online portal, was the sort of oddity that is common in the unemployment process.  It laid out the amount she would receive — $150 per week for up to 12 weeks — if she were deemed eligible for state benefits.  The notice was silent as to whether she would be found eligible and made no mention of when that decision might come.  Whether due to a glitch in the system or an overzealous administrator, she was sent this same correspondence three more times: once at 1:30 a.m. and twice at 5 a.m.

To Hill-Watkins, the agency’s timing was curious.  The day before, ProPublica had asked the DES about Hill-Watkins’ application.  “Am I not worthy of this unless someone else speaks up for me?” she wondered, “I did the work. And I’m the one sitting here without the money.”  (The DES did not respond directly when asked whether ProPublica’s questions influenced the agency’s timing or decision; its spokesperson said that Hill-Watkins’ claim was referred to a team “dedicated to resolving the oldest and most complicated claims.”)

Hill-Watkins tried calling the DES to find out more.  She wanted to know when she might obtain or qualify for these payments and whether she would also receive the additional $600 per week from the CARES Act.  As usual, she couldn’t get anyone on the phone.  Each of the four times she called, the automated message politely suggested she call back another time.

“I don’t have any more time, though, is the thing,” she told me on June 19, the day her rent was due.  She wondered if she would have to wait another eight weeks for the unemployment office to find her eligible.  Or to pay her.  “It’s unbelievable they can keep you waiting for this long,” she said, “and expect you to survive.”

By this point, she had missed her rent payment.  Managers at the hotel had come by and asked her to leave the room.  She told them that, because she had stayed in the hotel for more than 30 days and it was her primary residence, she believed she qualified as a tenant and was entitled to the same protections against evictions.

That argument did not appear to sway the manager.  Hill-Watkins’ keycard for the room was deactivated.  Unsure if she and Devan would be able to get back in if they left for even five minutes, they stayed in the room the entire weekend.  (The hotel manager did not respond to a request for comment.)

On Monday, June 22, came the news Hill-Watkins had been waiting two months to hear: She was eligible for unemployment benefits.  At 12:21 that afternoon, $750 was directly deposited into her bank account.   Hill-Watkins compared the feeling to the moving of a great mountain.

She allowed herself a moment of optimism.  She has long dreamed of saving up enough money to buy an RV.  If she had it her way, she would camp forever.  With the car, she and Devan could shelter in place in any state.  She wouldn’t have to worry about a checkout date or the hazards of social distancing.  The next time one of her children called her for help, she could ride to them and then ride away.  They would never have to worry about being homeless again.

Editor’s note:

As this story was about to be published, ProPublica learned that the freelance photographer ProPublica hired to take photographs of Shawn Hill-Watkins for this article was so moved by Hill-Watkins’ plight that she sold some of her work to benefit Hill-Watkins and sent her $2,000.  The funds arrived later on June 22, after Hill-Watkins received her unemployment benefits.  In addition, the photographer promoted a GoFundMe page for Hill-Watkins, which prompted $9,740 in contributions from other people as of June 29.  The photographer did not inform ProPublica that she was helping to raise funds for Hill-Watkins.

As laudable as the photographer’s intentions were, paying sources violates ProPublica’s editorial guidelines.  For that reason, we decided not to publish the original photographs taken for this story.  (We did pay her for her work.)

Ultimately, we concluded that because the photographer’s fundraising occurred after the reporting and writing for this article was completed (only fact-checking and editing remained at that point), this couldn’t be construed as paying Hill-Watkins for access.

Ariana Tobin contributed reporting.

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[dr-archeville]

In North Carolina, We’d Rather Not Talk About Racial Disparities. That’s Why They Persist.

Systemic racism marks every component of economic, social, and political life in North Carolina.

There’s been much in the news lately about the stunning racial disparities experienced in North Carolina as a result of the horrifying coronavirus.  African American Tar Heels have seen dramatically disproportionate rates of exposure, severe illness, death, access to health care, unemployment, job and family benefits, allowances to work at home, food insecurity, income, wealth, and misery.

The discordant numbers chill.  But they don’t surprise.

Racial disparity marks every component of economic, social, and political life in North Carolina.  Twice as many Blacks live in poverty as whites do.  Almost three times as many Black kids are poor.  The disparity is even higher for children under five.  Historically (even before the virus), twice as many African Americans here are unemployed, much higher percentages are uninsured, and three times as many families report negative net worth.

Black families possess, on average, an astonishing 8 percent of the wealth held by white families.  Black kids attend, very disproportionately, North Carolina’s highest-poverty schools.  Nearly 60 percent of the state’s prison inmates are Black, though African Americans make up only 22 percent of the population.  An unending cascade of irrefutable empirical studies also demonstrates massive and unexplainable racial disparities in policing, adjudication, employment, housing, and health care.

Poverty, race, and marginalization are constant and pervasive companions in the Tar Heel State.  Ever has it been so, from our first day of existence until this morning.

Without doubt, unless the term is to be drained of all meaning, North Carolina today experiences an intense, debilitating, and systemic (“of, or relating to, the entire body of an organism”) regime of racial subordination.  No thoughtful and fair-minded person familiar with our past undertakings and present circumstance could think we’re done with the challenges of equality, justice, and meaningful integration.

But we don’t talk much about this gaping and aspiration-negating chasm.  Not in our politics, in our public discourse, in our Rotary Clubs and chambers of commerce, on our campuses or in our pulpits.  I’m guessing if the racial roles were somehow reversed and white folks were disproportionately lodged at the bottom of our social and economic markers, we would regard it as a state emergency of the highest order.  Special sessions of the legislature would be triggered with dispatch.

As it is, colossal disparities between the conditions, circumstance, opportunity, and life chances of Blacks and whites in North Carolina are accepted as natural, expected, and unworrisome — like daybreak in the eastern sky.

This silence, in the face of such wrenching and historic discrimination, is surely a principal reason for the powerful demonstrations sweeping North Carolina and the nation in the wake of the brutal police-inflicted murder of George Floyd.

There is unsurpassed outrage over the cold, ruthlessly administered killing, of course.  Killing after barbarous killing.

But demonstrators also speak passionately of the world they see around them — the hardship, the cruelty, the denials of dignity and opportunity that torment their communities.  Protesters in the streets are, in effect, crying out, “Our leaders may find this tolerable, but we reject and despise such a hypocritical vision of life — we’re not helpless, and we will confront you at every turn.”

Still, the exception, as they say, demonstrates the rule.

Here’s something we also don’t discuss much, somewhere the disparity is even starker: The Republican Party has controlled both houses of the General Assembly since 2011.  It has often done so through very large majorities.  From 2011 until January 2019, Republicans enjoyed veto-proof supermajorities in both chambers.  Those margins were pared in the 2018 elections, but they remain large — 10 seats in the House and eight in the smaller Senate.

More alarming, all Republican legislators, in both chambers, are white.

As the surprisingly candid Republican Representative Holly Grange of Wilmington put it in 2019: “On my side, there’s not a lot of diversity; it’s a middle-age white man’s club.”

In 2020, there are 26 African American representatives in the state House.  There are 10 Black senators.  One Native American and two Indian Americans serve in the General Assembly.  No people of Latinx descent do.

The overall numbers, scant as they are, still mislead.  In the House, the 26 African Americans and one Native American are all Democrats.  All 65 Republicans are white.  In the Senate, the 10 African Americans and two Indian Americans are Democrats.  Every Republican (29) is white.  (Similar Republican tallies appeared in the 2011–12, 2013–14, 2015–16, and 2017–18 sessions.)  So when the majority caucuses in each chamber retire to their private deliberations to craft the laws of North Carolina, only white people attend.

One hundred and fifty years after the adoption of the 14th Amendment, North Carolina is effectively ruled by a White People’s Caucus.

Let that sink in for a minute.

Over the last decade, what legacy has this White People’s Caucus delivered?

In a sentence, North Carolina Republican lawmakers have repeatedly, pervasively, intentionally, and invidiously used government power to diminish the electoral, representational, legal, educational, and dignitary rights of African Americans.  The Republican caucuses of the North Carolina General Assembly not only look like white conclaves; they govern like them.

A brief listing will illustrate the point.  (It’s impossible to explore the racialized Republican anti-equality work in detail in a 2,800-word essay.  I have, however, recently written a book on the subject, Indecent Assembly.)

First, to protect their electoral prospects, Republicans immediately redrew their own districts, as the federal courts later ruled, to deliver one of the “largest racial gerrymanders ever confronted by an [American] court.”  It represented a “widespread, serious, longstanding constitutional violation” — denying an ample percentage of North Carolinians “a constitutionally adequate voice in the state legislature.”  The racial violation was so pronounced, the court said, it defeated the legislature’s legitimacy in subsequent sessions, violating the foundational notion of “popular sovereignty.”  (I’ve been reading constitutional decisions for almost 45 years.  I’ve rarely seen such strong words of condemnation by a court.)

They didn’t stop there.  In 2013, they passed an array of voting restrictions, including a voter identification requirement aimed at limiting African American access to the ballot.  The provision ended same-day voter registration, shortened the early voting period, ended out-of-precinct voting, and restricted various early-registration practices.  Another federal court later concluded that Republican leaders had studied every mechanism that elevated Black turnout and then, with “almost surgical precision,” eliminated or restricted each practice.  The lawmakers’ talk about ballot integrity, the court said, was a lie.  The restrictions were about race, not fairness.  It was old-fashioned Jim Crow work.  The judges noted that “neither this legislature, nor, as far as we can tell, any other legislature in the country has ever done so much, so fast, to restrict access to the franchise.”

Republican lawmakers were again called on the carpet in 2015 for trying to crush the representational and voting rights of Black candidates and voters.  Unhappy with the outcome of Greensboro City Council elections, which produced a Democratic majority and four African American council members, the General Assembly used a “truncated process,” pushed by Republican Senator Trudy Wade, to simply overturn the unseemly results by creating new districts double-bunking incumbents.  Wade claimed legislative immunity in the ensuing lawsuit to avoid having to explain, or answer for, her discriminatory motives.   Judge Catherine Eagles saw through the ruse and held this to be yet another move by the General Assembly to disenfranchise Black Tar Heels.

The White People’s Caucus hasn’t limited its efforts to merely suppressing Black voter rights.  After several Black defendants, having received death sentences in their criminal trials, proved that their capital sentence had “been sought or obtained on the basis of race,” in violation of North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act, the General Assembly simply repealed the statute.  Rather than opting to fix the discriminatory practices pled and proven, lawmakers shot the messenger.  They said, in effect, if prosecutors are seeking death sentences on racial grounds, we prefer not to know.  In North Carolina, that’s what we mean by “racial justice.”

The all-white Republican lawmakers also repaired to their closed meetings to significantly expand school charter and voucher programs in ways that would lead, as they did, to greater racial segregation in the schools.  Unlike the rest of the country, they responded to the Black Lives Matter movement by making it harder to obtain police-camera video.  And, famously, Republican lawmakers passed a new statute making it illegal for local authorities or state agencies to remove Confederate war memorials.

Governor Cooper tried to convince them to change course, saying, “We cannot continue to glorify a war against the United States of America fought in the defense of slavery.”

The bill’s sponsor, Senator Tommy Tucker, responded by noting that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery: “It was caused by the North and their tariffs over Southern goods.”

It’s almost hard to believe they struggle to win Black votes.

You would think that an all-white Republican governing majority in the statehouse, regularly and demonstrably passing statutes to burden, handicap, and harass Black citizens, would be an intense and heatedly contested focus of our political and social lives.  After all, this is not Mississippi or Alabama.  It’s North Carolina.

But many Tar Heels, maybe most, seem to think little or nothing of it.  As if someone here had quietly constructed a bridge to the 1950s.  

And this “hear no evil, see no evil” approach apparently includes an odd “speak no evil” component as well.  Not only is the heavily racialized agenda of the Republican General Assembly not to be witnessed or heard, but in a twisting of the aphorism, it is also not to be mentioned by critics of the crusade against people of color.  Somehow it is thought to be too rude or uncivil to characterize a legislative program as race-based.  That implies, the theory seems to go, that the folks carrying out the schemes to use state power to burden and handicap racial minorities are vile and reprehensible characters.  Even if their work is race-based, the label still shouldn’t be mentioned.  It’s too barbaric, too unseemly.  

It is the Voldemort of modern North Carolina politics.

I have at least a little experience on this front.  I speak across North Carolina a good deal and write regularly for three of its major newspapers.  For some years now, I’ve been sufficiently discourteous to mention, out loud and in print, the racial makeup of the Republican House and Senate caucuses as I described the elements of their potently racialized agenda.  I’m also a law professor at UNC-Chapel Hill.  This has led more than one campus administrator to suggest to me that pointing out the all-white status of the Republican caucus infuriates state lawmakers — it is overtly playing of the race card — and it will lead, or has led, to retaliation.

It is vulgar to mention that our Republican lawmakers constitute a White People’s Caucus.

Apparently, it’s not vulgar to be a White People’s Caucus.

It’s just nasty to name it.

Governor Pat McCrory signed, as a first priority of his administration, a massive voter suppression law — later found, as I said earlier, to be directed specifically African Americans.  Election law scholars called it the most oppressive in the nation, and the attorney general of the United States sued North Carolina, saying the voter ID requirement was designed to do the same job as poll taxes had in the Jim Crow South: diminish the Black vote.  I wrote that McCrory might be a backslapping glad-hander, but he was also “a 21st-century successor to Maddox, Wallace, and Faubus.”

A couple of days later, the leaders of the Pope Center and Civitas Institute published a joint article saying I’d launched such a “nasty and unhinged attack … so detached from reality [that] it’s hard to imagine a more vicious and false comparison for McCrory.”  University administrators issued warnings that I might be fired.  Civitas filed a series of public records requests demanding my correspondence, calendar entries, phone logs, text messages, and emails by the thousands.  When I rebuffed legislators’ demands that I stop publishing in The News & Observer, the UNC Board of Governors closed the Poverty Center I ran.  Some months later, lawmakers cut the budget of the law school where I work by a half-million dollars by enacting what Democrats labeled “the Gene Nichol transfer amendment.”

When I wrote a subsequent newspaper article, in April 2019, outlining a long list of the General Assembly’s race-based constitutional violations and characterized the efforts as reflective of an agenda of “muscular racism,” Senator Vicki Sawyer published a response indicating that, “as a lifelong Republican and public servant,” she was “horrified to read Gene Nichol’s race-baiting diatribe.”  I had purportedly carried out “a crusade to sully the reputations of decent people … with horrible labels.”

A few months earlier, in September 2018, I had participated in a debate sponsored by the N&O with conservative columnist J. Peder Zane, whom I like and enjoy reading.  Zane made an analogous and more thoughtful point.  “When you say Republicans are being racist,” he said, it is “like the worst thing that can be said about somebody, the worst name someone can be called, at least in modern culture.”  You are saying “they are absolutely repugnant people, repugnant human beings.”

I suggested my goal was not to call names but to focus on what lawmakers do: “I say we’ve had this array of legislative enactments from Republicans in the statehouse with the decided purpose of making life more difficult and challenging for African Americans, and that is unacceptable.”  And it’s not just me saying that, I added, it’s “court after court, state and federal.”

Zane responded: “If you’re saying they intentionally used the power of state government to harm Black people, because they’re Black, you’re saying they’re racist.”

Therein, perhaps, lies the rub.  It’s not enough, apparently, to point out that our lawmakers purposefully harm Black Tar Heels.  You have to show they do it with the darkest of hearts.  For me, I don’t care much about their hearts one way or the other.

The disagreement modestly mirrors a point now made occasionally by the U.S. Supreme Court.  As Justice Samuel Alito explained in his dissent in the 2017 case Cooper v. Harris: “Courts are obliged to exercise extraordinary caution in adjudicating claims that a state has drawn districts on the basis of race.  The evidentiary burden is demanding.  When a federal court says that race was a legislature’s predominant purpose in drawing a district, it accuses the legislature of offensive and demeaning conduct.  That is a grave accusation to level against a state.”

So, the theory goes, stay away from race.  Don’t name it.

If you can show that lawmakers are using racial determinations to burden their adversaries, don’t mention the R-word.  Keep mum because saying they are using the power of government to constrain or wound Black Tar Heels sounds like you’re saying they are racist.  Civility demands that it goes unmentioned.  It sounds too grizzly.  It says something too dark.

After all, our lawmakers aren’t going around in white-robed lynching parties.  Black Tar Heels who try to vote aren’t being shot outside the polls.  It’s not Wilmington in 1898.  We’ve come far in North Carolina.  Saying our lawmakers are carrying out a racialized agenda in the statehouse in 2020, with our apparent consent, would be announcing something about ourselves, collectively, that we couldn’t bear.  It’s best to leave such odious landscapes unexplored.

But here’s what that means in North Carolina: All-white caucuses repair to closed-door meetings to decide our laws.  No persons of color are present to object.  The all-white assemblies routinely propose laws that disadvantage and are strongly opposed by African Americans and other racial minorities, making it tougher for them to vote, to get effective representation, to hold on to elections already won, to get access to the courts, to be free from a racially imposed sanctions, to enjoy an equal education, to escape police brutality.

The lawmakers regularly enact statutes that are invalidated by both state and federal courts as clear examples of intentional race discrimination.  They occasionally admit that they legislate to disadvantage Black people, but they claim they do so because the Black people are Democrats, not because they’re Black.

Despite all this, it is quite routine to say this portfolio cannot be characterized as “racialized” or “race-based” or reflective of “racism” — because that is too horrifying to the modern ear.

These wounds best go unmentioned.  Better for Black Tar Heels to suffer than for white folks to feel bad about themselves.

Gene Nichol is the Boyd-Tinsley Distinguished Professor of Law at UNC-Chapel Hill.  His most recent book is Indecent Assembly: The North Carolina Legislature’s Blueprint for the War Against Democracy and Equality.

Comment on this story at [email protected].

DEAR READERS, WE NEED YOUR HELP NOW MORE THAN EVER.  Support independent local journalism by joining the INDY Press Club today.   Your contributions will keep our fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle, coronavirus be damned.

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[dr-archeville]

The NCGOP’s Lt. Gov. Candidate Apparently Thinks the Coronavirus Is a “Globalist” Conspiracy to Destroy Donald Trump

Mark Robinson—who should maybe scrub his Facebook page—also called the LGBTQ community “devil worshiping child molesters” and said the movie “Black Panther” was made by “satanic minions.”

Eight days after securing the North Carolina Republican Party’s nomination for lieutenant governor, Mark Keith Robinson posted on Facebook that the coronavirus was more or less like the flu — and he’d seen Michael Jordan play a basketball game with the flu, so suck it up, buttercups. 

I actually watched Micheal Jordan play an entire NBA game with a full blown case of INFLUENZA, which kills tens of thousands of people each year. 

Two days later — a few hours before President Trump declared a coronavirus-related national state of emergency on March 13 — Robinson posted this: 

Sadly, what we suspect is true. It seems the  globalist will stop at nothing to destroy the progress of American Exceptionalism that this PRESIDENT promised and DELIVERED. 

(Free advice: Using the word “globalist,” especially when taking on conspiratorial tones, is generally frowned upon and often considered anti-semitic.)

An hour later, this:

Our current enemy is not disease and it’s danger... it’s deception and its deceit. 

Two weeks later, on February 28, when the contours of the epidemic were becoming clear: 

The looming pandemic I’m most worried about is SOCIALISM.

To recap, then:

The (ahem) globalists are taking advantage of a pandemic to destroy the president, who is great.

We shouldn’t fear the coronavirus.  We should fight the people who are lying about the coronavirus.

Socialism is scarier than a disease that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans this year.

Robinson, if elected, would become North Carolina’s first black lieutenant governor.  (Since he’ll face Yvonne Holley in November, that will happen either way.)  He rose to national prominence on Fox News as a pro-gun everyman after his angry retort to the Greensboro City Council — which was debating canceling a gun show in 2018 — went viral.

“I'm a law-abiding citizen who's never shot anybody,” Robinson told the council.  “It seems every time we have one of these shootings, nobody wants to put the blame where it goes, which is at the shooter’s feet.  You want to put it at my feet.  It doesn't make any sense.”

That video was promoted by the NRA, Breitbart, Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, right-wing U.S. Representative Mark Walker, and circulated throughout conservative media, reaching tens of millions of viewers.  It made its way to Fox, whose hosts fawned over him as a “strong defender of the American Constitution.”  One, Ashley Earhardt, encouraged him to run for office — which, of course, he did.

But no one, it seems, looked into his background — or even scanned his Facebook page — save for the liberal outlets Alternet and American Independent.   (And, amazingly, no one at the NCGOP has told Robinson to go scrub his page of some of these posts.)  If they did, they would have found that while he most certainly loves his guns and looooooves his Trump, he really, really does not like gay people.  Or trans people.  Or the homosexual agenda.  Or the Obamas.  Or the Clintons.  Or the movie Black Panther.   Or social justice.  Or abortion rights.  Or marijuana legalization.  Or Mitt Romney.  Or Democrats, who are communists — i.e., satanists.  And that “globalist” remark might not have been a slip of the keyboard.

So let’s take a look back at Mark Robinson’s unfiltered thoughts before and after he became the NCGOP’s choice for lieutenant governor.  Here he is, in his own words.

On the LGBTQ community, who are devil-worshipers coming for your children: “The sick, deranged, sexual degenerates who promote this type of demonic behavior are the ones who will take the next step in our continuing moral decline toward total depravity.  Free love, then homosexuality.  Now the next push; the sexualization of the perverts most cherished target, CHILDREN.  These devil worshiping child molesters will not stop until they can legally abuse God's most precious gifts to us.”

He also thinks that parents of trans children have “mentally raped” their kids: “Those adults who CHOOSE to follow the path of gender ‘transitioning’ have that right, but children should not be part of this.  Children are being used as propagandized shields in the fight to force the sexual preferences of a few down the collective throat of the American people.  From teaching ‘gender fluidity’ to grade schoolers, to story time with drag queens, to nine year olds sexually dancing for grown ups, those who intend to victimize children for their own sake are on the march.  Those who push these agendas do so by bullying society with threats of castigation.  They have created a climate of fear that pushes the painfully obvious voices of reality and reason from the conversation.

“Well I WILL NOT be bullied and I WILL NOT be silenced.  No friendship, no kinship, no job, no public office is worth staying silent while these children are being mentally raped.  Those who push these agendas can count me as an ENEMY.  I will speak up against you at EVERY turn and rally those around me to do the same.  Crucify me if you like.  The wicked crucified Christ for telling the truth, so I’ll be in GOOD company.”

More thoughts on gay people, from 2017: “You CAN NOT love God and support the homosexual agenda.”

And more, from 2018, on gay rights being the end of civilization: “I posted this back in 2014.  Sadly, it is currently being proven true.  We have pushed homosexuality over the top.  Mark my words PEDOPHILLA is next, which will be closely followed by the END of civilization as we know it.”

After the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016: “Homosexuality is STILL an abominable sin and I WILL NOT join in ‘celebrating gay pride’ nor will I fly their sacrilegious flag on my page.  Sorry if this offends anyone, but I'm not falling for the media/pop culture ‘okey-doke.’”

On Michelle Obama, in January 2017: “Michelle Obama is an anti-American, abortion and gay marriage supporting, liberal leftist elitist and I'll be glad when he takes his boyfriend and leaves the White House.”  (Get it? Michelle Obama is a man.)  He called Barack Obama a “worthless, anti-American atheist who wanted to bring this nation to it knees, then raise it back to it's feet as a European style socialist hell hole.”

Here’s another very funny joke about gender roles (we think?): “It’s odd that the left doesn’t call masculinity ‘toxic’ when it’s competing against women in female athletics.”

One more: “It seems men aren’t being encouraged to excel anywhere these days... except in female athletics.”

And another: “The same people who claim the new Rambo movie is to ‘manly’ are the same people who think it’s okay for the homecoming queen to BE a man.”

Here he is posting a birther meme.

In a now-deleted post, saved for posterity in a screenshot, he disparages Muslims.

On African Americans who support the Democratic Party: “Half of black Democrats don't realize they are slaves and don't know who their masters are.  The other half don't care.”

He called Black Panther a movie made by the “satanic minions in Hollywood” and “a product that was made in the dominion of the Devil.”  He also expressed amazement that African Americans supported a superhero movie “created by an agnostic Jew and put to film by satanic marxist.  How can this trash, that was only created to pull the shekels out of your Schvartze pockets, invoke any pride?”

(Shekels, you say?  Hmm.)

In February, while running for lieutenant governor, he called Bernie Sanders a “disgusting socialist” — really, par for the course in a GOP primary — and criticized him for wanting to legalized cannabis: “That disgusting socialist Bernie Sanders is actually pitching legalizing dope which has destroyed black communities, and expanding welfare which has destroyed the black family, to BLACK VOTERS!”

In January, he accused Governor Cooper of welcoming refugees for nefarious purposes: “Governor Cooper’s ‘welcoming’ of ‘refugees’ is as easy to see through as freshly cleaned windows.  It is painfully obvious he is attempting to set the stage for creating ‘sanctuary cites’ [sic] to protect those who have thumbed their noses at our federal immigration laws.  In doing this, the main goal is to expand an entitled voting class that depends on the welfare state for its sustenance.  Governor Cooper is no more than a socialist wolf in humanitarian clothes.  He claims to stand for those in need, but we know the truth.  His party rejected ‘faith’ on national television.  And the unborn need ‘safety.’  He vetoed that need.”

In December, he blamed America’s education system for Trump’s impeachment: “Our 2nd Amendment is under attack because we don’t TEACH the Constitution anymore.  Our young people want socialism because we don’t TEACH history anymore.  Our Constitutional Republic is being called a democracy because we don’t TEACH civics anymore.  And our President is being impeached by those who helped create the current ‘education’ system and those who were indoctrinated in the current ‘education’ system.”

He does not like democracy (and is pedantic — wrongly so, hilariously — about that word): “Those who defend our REPUBLIC do so to keep us from becoming a democracy.”

He posted that ex-football player Michael Vick’s dog-murdering doesn’t bother him that much because abortion is legal: “I’ll start worrying about ex-con football players who ILLEGALLY killed dogs after we stop licensed physicians from LEGALLY KILLING CHILDREN.”

He followed up, emphasizing that eliminating reproductive rights is his top priority: “Killing and torturing animals is absolutely terrible.  But here is the stark and sickening difference.  The cruel killing and tearing apart of animals is ILLEGAL.  The murder of the most innocent HUMANS on earth IS NOT.  That difference SICKENS ME, and it is my HIGHEST priority to fight to change that.”

Robinson posted … whatever this is … in response to Confederate statues be removed: “While the racially blinded are pulling down statues of dead men, the wicked are busy erecting temples to baal in which they will sacrifice the living in the womb.”

He is proudly authoritarian: “The safety of our nation is in peril because those who despise God, discipline, and law and order want to disarm those who believe in God, discipline, and law and order.”

He’s not bothered by asylum-seekers being separated from their families at the border: “‘American immigration law’ is not causing people to be ‘separated from their families.’  BREAKING American immigration law is causing that separation.”

He does not like social justice or pastors who promote it: “Pastors who ‘fight for social justice’ instead of standing un-afraid for the WORD OF GOD should trade their ‘high collars’ for dog collars.”

He doesn’t like the media: “The mainstream media is full of a bunch of hyper-sensitive, deceitful, childlike liars who willfully enflame passions through the spreading of false narratives.”

He doesn’t like Mitt Romney: “The left ‘loves’ CONservatives like Mitt Romney.  You know, the ‘thinking’ conservative who is ‘educated’ and refined.  The one that will reach across the aisle and find ‘common ground.’  The one who respects the voices of dissent and allows all voices to be heard.  The one that.... Okay let’s be real.  What the left really likes are the spineless jellybacks that won’t speak up and won’t fight back.  The ones whose only fight is a quest for power and will do ANYTHING to maintain a seat at the table that provides such.  The ones who are toothless lap dogs who will lounge in luxury while the house is ransacked and robbed.  The ones who speak loudest when they are being exposed as a no good, do nothing, weak kneed, stooges. The ones like Mitt Romney.”

And, finally, he is proud to have been endorsed by Ted Nugent — who, in 2012, endorsed Mitt Romney.

Contact editor in chief Jeffrey C. Billman at [email protected].

DEAR READERS, WE NEED YOUR HELP NOW MORE THAN EVER. Support independent local journalism by joining the INDY Press Club today. Your contributions will keep our fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle, coronavirus be damned.

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[dr-archeville]

Republicans Override Cooper Budget Veto During 9/11 Ceremony With Most Dems Absent

“Is this the legacy you want?”

On Tuesday morning, while Governor Cooper attended a ceremony remembering the victims of the 9/11 attacks, House Republicans unexpectedly voted to override Cooper’s budget veto, taking advantage of Democratic absences to claim the supermajority they needed.

As Speaker Tim Moore attempted to call the vote during the 8:30 a.m. session — during which Democrats say they were told no votes would be taken — Wilmington Demoract Deb Butler stood up in a fury, lambasting Moore as a coward.  Of the 120 House members, 64 were in attendance; only 9 of them were Democrats.  

“How dare you subject this body to trickery, deceptive practices, hijacking the process,” Butler shouted.  “It is so typical of the way you conduct yourself.  How dare you, Mr. Speaker?  If this is the way you believe democracy works, shame on you.”

A vote to override Cooper’s veto on the budget had been on the calendar since July, but Republicans, who lost their supermajority in last November’s elections, lacked the votes.  That has left the budget in a months-long standoff, with Cooper insisting that Medicaid expansion be included in a budget deal, and Republicans refusing to budge.  More recently, the House and Senate have passed pieces of the budget raises wages for some state workers, which Cooper has signed, but the larger budget remained deadlocked.

To win the budget war without compromising on Medicaid, Moore needed to pull a stunt.  He found an opportunity moments before the eighteenth anniversary of when terrorists flew the first plane into the North Tower of New York’s World Trade Center.

The vote passed 55–9 along party lines.  It must now clear the Senate, where Republicans also lack a supermajority — and where, presumably, Democrats will no longer take Republican leaders at their word.

The North Carolina Association of Educators, a Democratic ally, blasted the Republicans’ “unbelievably deceitful conduct.”

“By playing underhanded political games in an attempt to win at all costs, they are subverting the democratic process and destroying whatever shred of trust remained between Republicans and the people of North Carolina,” NCAE president Mark Jewell said in a statement.

This isn’t the first time Republicans in the General Assembly have subverted the democratic process to gain power.

The members of the legislature were elected in districts that a Wake County Superior Court ruled last week were unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders.  This followed previous federal court decisions that held that the legislative districts drawn in 2011, after the Republicans gained power, were unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.  The General Assembly declined to appeal the Superior Court’s decision to the state Supreme Court and is now in the process of redrawing the districts — ostensibly in a transparent, nonpartisan manner, although lawmakers may simply be trolling the court.

“You wait until a moment when you suggest there will be no votes,” Butler shouted at Moore this morning, refusing to yield the floor.  “You are making a mockery of this process.  You are deceiving all of North Carolina.  Your leadership is an embarrassment to the history of this great state.”

She continued: “At this moment in time, you are doing the unspeakable. Is this the legacy you want?”

Contact staff writer Leigh Tauss at [email protected].

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Here’s what Jeff Jackson (Senator for NC’s 37′s District) had to say:

Here's the full story on what happened this morning with the veto override:

Almost every morning while we’re in session, the General Assembly begins with a "skeletal session." This is held for procedural reasons and no votes are taken. Gavel in, gavel out. A formality.

Not only is this session a formality, but on this specific occasion Republican leadership had actually told the Democrats there would be no votes. This is routine. Non-voting sessions happen almost every single day.

But on this morning - after telling Democrats that there would be no votes - the House Republicans used the skeletal session to ambush Democrats with the biggest vote of the year.

At 8:40 a.m., they called a vote on the veto override on our $24 billion budget.

To understand what a big deal this was, you have to know that the (Democratic) Governor had vetoed their (Republican-passed) budget about two months ago. Both sides were in the process of negotiating a better budget, with major issues including teacher pay and Medicaid expansion.

It’s also important to know that this is the first time in almost a decade that Republicans have actually had to negotiate with Democrats on the budget. Until the last election, the GOP had the votes to override any gubernatorial veto. Now they don’t, and for these folks who were used to absolute power that comedown has been absolutely excruciating.

So they found a way around it.

After telling Democrats there would be no votes, they called a vote.

This was while our Governor and at least one of our Democratic members were at a ceremony honoring those who died on September 11th.

A handful of Democrats were on the floor conducting other business. Rep. Butler, a Democrat from the coast, immediately stood and objected. Other members asked to be recognized so they could object, but the Speaker refused to recognize them and proceeded with the vote.

The budget veto was overridden, 55-9.

When they called the surprise vote, barely half the members of the body were present - almost all of them Republicans. They had planned this.

The veto still stands in the Senate, where our members intend to defend it.

It's remarkable to say this because in five years I've seen some really bad stuff, but I think this qualifies as a new low. To be openly dishonest and use that to pass the most high-profile legislation of the year is a new level of outright corruption that I hadn't seen before today.

[source]

[dr-archeville]

Courts Sign Off on New Congressional Districts

Even with the new maps, Republicans will likely maintain dominance in the legislature.

North Carolina's gerrymandering saga is over, at least for now.

The new maps will likely ensure Republicans maintain dominance in the state's congressional seats -- albeit with smaller margins -- much to Democrats dismay.

A three-judge panel unanimously ruled that the congressional districts drawn by the NC General Assembly will be acceptable for the 2020 elections.

The NC Board of Elections stated in a press release that candidate filing for NC's thirteen congressional districts would begin immediately.

The redrawn districts were put on hold by the NC Superior Court in November while courts mulled over the partisan makeup of the districts and decided if they met the requirements of the court's recent gerrymandering ruling.

The new districts give the Republican party an 8-5 advantage, despite the fact that there are nearly a half million more registered Democrats in the state.

“North Carolina Republicans yet again run out the clock on fair maps, denying justice to North Carolina voters and forcing our state to go another election using undemocratic district lines,” says NC Democratic Party chairman Wayne Goodwin.  “North Carolina Democrats will not stop fighting for truly fair maps where voters -- not undemocratically-elected politicians -- choose their representatives.”

Candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives can start filing Monday, along with those running for U.S. Senate, state office, and various judicial positions.  Everyone who intends to run has until December 20 at noon to file with the NC Board of Elections.

As of Monday afternoon, no candidates had filed to run for U.S. House of Representatives.

Primary elections will start March 3.  The general election will take place on November 3.

UPDATE: This story has been updated to clarify that the maps affect state congressional districts.

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[dr-archeville]

Could Four Missing Words From a Proposed Constitutional Amendment Render the Governor Powerless Without Anyone Realizing It?

Democrats — and the General Assembly’s nonpartisan Legislative Analysis Division — say a loophole could allow the legislature to circumvent the veto whenever it wanted

Ever since the Republican-dominated General Assembly put six constitutional amendments on the November ballot in June, Senator Jeff Jackson, a Charlotte Democrat, has been trying to get anyone who will listen to pay attention to one of them.   Not even what's in the amendment, but rather what's not there — four words that he contends could fundamentally reshape North Carolina politics, rendering the legislature all-powerful and the governor effectively impotent.

And residents who vote on the amendment will have absolutely no idea what it really does — or could do, he says.

The amendment, spelled out in SB 814, essentially transfers the governor's power to fill judicial vacancies to the legislature.  If it passes, the legislature, governor, and chief justice of the state Supreme Court will create a nonpartisan commission that vets nominees, then forwards ones it deems qualified to the General Assembly, which will select "at least two" to present to the governor.  If the governor refuses to appoint one of them within ten days, the legislature will get to pick its favorite.

How this will actually work is anyone's guess.  As with the rest of the amendments, which were rushed through at breakneck speed, the General Assembly punted on so-called implementing legislation until after the election.  So, for now, both the exact makeup of the commission and the method the General Assembly will use to select its preferred nominees are unclear.

But ignore for the time being the question of whether the amendment's stated purpose is a good idea, and look instead at what SB 814 doesn't say that previous constitutional amendments have said.

Specifically, it doesn't include the words "contain no other matter."

Understanding why those four words are important requires a brief history lesson: Until 1997, North Carolina was the last state in the union to deny its governor a veto.  That changed through a compromise between the then-Republican House and Democratic Senate, which crafted a constitutional amendment that voters approved in 1996 granting a veto, albeit with some exceptions.  The governor cannot veto bills that draw congressional or legislative districts, local bills that only affect a handful of counties, joint resolutions, amendments to the state constitution, and, most important for our purposes, bills that make appointments to public office, such as judges.

The problem, Jackson argues, is that with this constitutional amendment, there would be no restrictions on what else the legislature could pack into a bill filling a judicial vacancy — a bill the governor could not veto.  In theory, lawmakers could wait for a judicial vacancy and then slap an entire budget (or something as controversial as HB 2, or literally anything else) into the bill that fills it, and the governor couldn't stop them.

That's not as crazy as it sounds.

Gerry Cohen, a former special counsel for the General Assembly who worked on the veto compromise in the mid-nineties, told me, "I agree one hundred percent with [Jackson's] conclusion.  It could be an oversight, or it could be deliberate."

In a July 31 email to Jackson's office, Kara McCraw, a staff attorney with the General Assembly's nonpartisan Legislative Analysis Division, appears to concur: "Because there is no restriction on adding other matters to these judicial vacancy bills, a court could reasonably interpret that a judicial vacancy bill and legislation on other matters is not subject to the Governor's veto," she writes.

If you're inclined to believe this wasn't a mistake, here's some evidence to support your case: On Saturday, when the legislature convened to override two of Governor Cooper's vetoes, Jackson proposed a bill to close the loophole.  Republicans declined.

"Their intent is to preserve the possibility," Jackson says.

Of course, Republicans see it differently.  As one top GOP staffer told me, this is all premature.  Until the General Assembly passes implementing legislation, it's not even clear lawmakers will send their picks to the governor in the form of a bill rather than by an election of the legislature; that means there might not be any bill to tack additional legislation onto.

Besides, the staffer says, the lawmakers who wrote the amendment have said it wasn't their intent to create a Trojan horse, and courts will take that into account.  (Asked why the Republicans didn't back Jackson's bill, the staffer replies, "They think those words are superfluous and unnecessary.  You're admitting you got it wrong before.")

"If you're a judge, you only look at the intent if the plain reading [of the amendment] is ambiguous," counters Jackson, an attorney.  "The plain reading is very clear.  Their intent isn't that relevant."

When viewed in context, Jackson adds, it's not difficult to question whether Republicans' declarations of goodwill are credible.  "They're in the middle of a dedicated campaign to roll back the governor's power," he says.  "This isn't out of the blue."

That's undeniably true.  But so too is this observation, from the GOP staffer: "There's a great deal of distrust between the parties.  There are tendencies to look at the other sides' motivations as sinisterly as possible."

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[dr-archeville]

Seeking Embarrassment, Republican Representatives Introduce Bill to Make Gay Marriage Illegal Again

Peeved by that whole marriage-equality thing, Republican representatives Speciale, Pittman, Clampitt, and Ford introduced a bill today that would make gay marriage illegal again, defying the Supreme Court's Obergefell v. Hodges decision that legalized gay marriage nationwide.

It hasn't even been two weeks since the legislature green-lighted the fake HB 2 repeal and already some of our lawmakers are feeling antsy.  Hold our Pepsi, Kendall Jenner.  It's time to embarrass the state once again with homophobic legislation.

Peeved by that whole marriage equality thing, Republican Representatives Michael Speciale, Larry Pittman, Mike Clampitt, and Carl Ford introduced a bill today that would make gay marriage illegal again — defying the Supreme Court's Obergefell v. Hodges decision that legalized gay marriage nationwide — because, God.

House Bill 780, or the "Uphold Historical Marriage Act,"  would invalidate "marriages between persons of the same gender" by making same-sex marriage "null and void in the state of North Carolina."  Sticking with the separation of church and state philosophy, the bill says the Supreme Court's decision "exceeds the authority of the court relative to the decree of Almighty God that 'a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh’ (Genesis 2:24, ESV) and abrogates the clear meaning and understanding of marriage in all societies throughout prior history.”

"Republicans in the General Assembly seem to have a special talent for embarrassing themselves and our state," North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Wayne Goodwin said in a statement.  "Instead of wasting their time on hateful, discriminatory and clearly unconstitutional legislation, they should be working with Governor Cooper to improve our schools and cut taxes for the middle class."

Wake County Commissioner John Burns took the gloves off.

Pittman and Speciale are embarrassments to the State of North Carolina and should be shunned from public life. #ncpol

— John Burns (@johnburnsnc)

April 11, 2017

Speciale and Pittman didn't weigh in on Twitter and don't appear to have Twitter accounts, as they favor the technology consistent with the decades they live in. 

... seriously?!